How The Pallet Made The Modern Supply Chain A Reality

The modern world relies so heavily on exceptionally organised, heavy-duty logistics in order to make it possible for goods to travel rapidly throughout the supply chain from raw materials warehouse to final fulfilment centre.

This modern supply chain system that we know and recognise today relies on three major inventions that have fundamentally shaped it.

The first is the standardised ISO shipping container, which allowed for the efficient transport of goods in extreme weather conditions and the ability to stack huge amounts of disparate types of cargo, allowing for the gargantuan container ships that we see today.

The second is the narrow-aisle forklift, which allowed for goods to be stacked in increasingly tall, increasingly efficient quantities in warehouses. This is what made it possible to create such huge fulfilment centres where goods could be stacked on heavy-duty shelving.

Finally, there was the standardisation of the wooden pallet, which despite being smaller and far simpler an invention is perhaps the most important to modern business.

The Development of The Modern Pallet

The concept of a skid is nothing new, with some theories hypothesising that projects in Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt were constructed with the help of skids to ensure that heavy construction materials could be moved with far less difficulty than if they were scraped along the ground.

It quickly became clear that skids could not only move cargo impossible to shift otherwise, but they could transport otherwise loose goods with an unparalleled level of efficiency.

A railway trade magazine in 1931 claimed that skids reduced the time to load 13,000 cases of tinned goods from three days to four hours.

This concept has existed for a long time, but what changed everything was the development of a standardised way of storing and transporting goods, which is collectively known as containerisation and drastically lowered the price of shipping goods over considerable distances.

Despite being named after the shipping container, it would only be possible to load the amount of goods needed to make such a system worthwhile with the help of petrol-powered forklifts (in the decades before electric forklifts became viable). 

These could only function with a standard-sized pallet designed for a forklift to scoop up and carry securely.

These developments coincided with the Second World War, which became the testbed for a lot of logistics developments as they were used extensively and highly successfully to store and move supplies throughout the Pacific campaigns.

After the war, many of these wartime developments were patented, most notably the four-way pallet that could be loaded in any direction and the shape of logistics changed drastically from 1949 onwards.

Packaging (and sometimes the goods themselves were optimised so as many of them could fit on a single standardised pallet as possible, and warehouses were structured to store as many pallets as possible in the most efficient way possible.

Amazingly, despite these developments, there is still a greater potential for evolution, with different materials, dimensions and slightly different designs available and used in different regions, although major changes would fundamentally change how warehouses look again.

For more information on How The Pallet Made The Modern Supply Chain A Reality talk to UK Shelving Ltd